Even if it’s not directly related to piracy, he will try to censor the internet in ways that will harm your possibilities of consuming pirated content.

Get a vpn. From a country that doesn’t make part of the 14 eyes, with real no-logs policy and, if possible, that accepts cash, crypto or prepaid cards. Ditch windows too.

Been doing this for the last two years since i got my deck. I’m not really sure what are you doing differently but I have not changed my way of dealing with these installs singe the beginning.

I’m at work right now so i can’t take a pic, but I have an SD and an external drive for my steam deck. When I’m installing a repack through proton (or also a gog game through proton), it will let me pick my SD as the drive D and my ssd as drive E same way as if I were in windows. I can post a pic later today.

It’s pretty straightforward. You just select the unit as you do in windows (as long as it is mounted).

I’ve been installing dodi, elamigos, fitgirl repacks for a while and still have to find one not working. Dunno what repacks are you installing.

I do it all the time. Just add it to steam as a non steam app and select the proton version you want to use. It will run just fine.

EDIT: If you need to install first, just add the installer as a non steam program, run it, install normally and then chang the path of the exe and the working folder to those of the installed game

I do have as many too at work.

I use one VM for each iteration of my automation software. Our factory has machines ranging from the 90s to present day, and they use different software environments to be programmed. In order to minimize the risk of data loss, we have one virtual machine with every software environment, that way if one gets corrupted, the damage is contained. It also makes them easier to export to new computers when we need to replace ours.

If you turn off your deck being online and then turn it on again somewhere with no internet access, sometimes it will not get past the “looking for updates” screen before loading steam. I’ve had that happen more than enough times. Only way to exit from that loop is connecting to internet, but that’s not always possible.

Haven’t tried it myself, but people report they are getting it running following some steps in its protonDB page

My main gaming device is now a steam deck. I’ve run on it mostly everything I’m interested in. I reckon I don’t like competitive games, so I never tried lol or Fortnite or CoD or anything of the likes, but the deck at home is running from Genshin impact to Final Fantasy 14. No man’s sky, assassin’s creed odyssey, ff16 demo, and every indie I wanted to play.

And except for games like Genshin impact or honkai star rail (not for me but for my SO) which needed a different launcher and some small tweaking, the rest of the games have been running “out of the box”, doing no tweaking at all.

Only for the kind of gaming that is itself a cancer: the one that wants to install a rootkit “anticheat” on your system.

I have a steam deck since the launch of the device and even stuff like old C&C games run on it. Hell, the little guy is able to run even FF16!

Edit: typo